ruubakar : 'Face to business,' ready for
business, intent (upon); approaching, in hand, on foot, about to be, in agitation;
agitated, proceeded on (as a suit at law); --a proceeding (of a cause); an
order'. (Platts p.602)

The heart has made a complaint against the eye, that neitherdoes
it gaze, nor am I murdered. He calls the eye [aa;Nkh]
the 'sight' [diidah], but to use in every place 'sight'
instead of 'eye' is a bad thing, because in Urdu idiom they call a bold and
shameless eye a diidah , and the word has become peculiar
to women's language. [Some examples.] In this verse by saying 'sight' instead
of 'eye' he has loosened the shape; even a blind person would notice such
ruination. But the theme
of the verse is very lofty.

The second flaw in this verse is that.... in reality the
structure is dil mudda((ii banaa-o-diidah mudda((;aa banaa
, and he has brought in between two Hindi
sentences a Persian connector. The poets of Lucknow avoid this, and so they
should. (256)

He says that the heart has opened a case against the eyes,
that 'because of the impropriety of their ogling glances, I have become immersed
in sorrow and disaster. It's necessary and required that I should receive
justice from the porch of the ruler of passion.' (313)

The heart has made the complaint that 'neither do the the
eyes look at the face of the beloved, nor am I destroyed'. And today again
there will be a hearing of this case, in which a charge has been made against
the gaze. [He goes on to argue at length against Nazm's objections, with evidence
from other poets.] (463)

FWP:

Here's one of the relatively few verses in which the charm
comes from wordplay related to bureaucratic terminology. In this case, it's
that of the law court. The heart became a plaintiff, and the eye something
like the 'thing being sued for'. The commentators seem to take the eye as
the defendant, but that doesn't seem to suit the sense of mudda((;aa
.

The commentators also seem sure that they know the content
of the complaint; but as can be seen from the examples above, they don't agree
about what it is. This isn't surprising; we've seen so many verses in which
Ghalib sets up a framework and forces us to fill in the details from our own
imaginations. Does the heart complain because it wants to have a 'sight' of
the beloved, and cannot? Could the heart even be suing the beloved, for withholding
herself from the lover's gaze? Or does the heart complain because it has had
all too deadly a 'sight' already (as Bekhud Dihlavi maintains)?

No matter how we decide such questions, the real pleasure
of the verse is obviously in its wordplay. Not only is there the clever use
of ponderous (but multivalent) legal terminology-- there are also the body
parts. We have a 'heart', the 'sight' or 'eye', the 'gaze' (which surely unites
heart and eye). And best of all, we have a word that unites the legal with
the physical: the cleverly chosen ruubakaar , a legal
term that literally means 'face [ruu] toward action'.

Arshi is right to suggest for comparison {164,13},
which also concerns a lawsuit, and which gets its punch from another clever
use of ruubakaarii . By no coincidence, in both verses
these words occupy the strategic, last-possible-moment rhyme
position.